What's going on in your winery today..

[lockwood1956]

I can get on with some bottling my bulk pack of corks has arrived!

BOTTLING????????

Turned to the dark side?

it will be taps next!

[Cellar_Rat]

Misunderstand me you do. Bottling fermenters frees up it does !

[lockwood1956]

lol

[koomber]

Modified my new brew kettle (well, new to me). Did a brew on Friday (a rather dashing little 80/-) but it would siphon out the last 5L or so of wort. Had a look at it today and the connection between the hop filter and the bulkhead leaked air (so once the liquid level got below this it would preferentially suck air rather than liquid, stopping flow).

Bit of a pain in the circular brown thing to get it fixed involving much use of a file and plenty of solder. But it's fixed now. Gone from 5 to 10L left at loss of suction using water to 500mL. MUCH BETTER.

Gonna weigh out some grain tonight for a Extra Special Bitter I'm gonna brew in the morning. So here's hoping it works well.

[koomber]

Modification to the brewing kettle was a roaring success. The only way I could have gotten more out of the boiler would have been to wring out the hops! Which is good because it was a complete nightmare to get it working, with lots of unmaking solder joints and cleaning them up before refitting them.

Beer looks like it'll be quite good too. As a small experiment I did this:

Boil for 30 minutes
Add 21g of Target and boil 15min
Add 30g of Fuggles
Add 30g of EKG and boil for 15 min
Kill the heat and add another 30g of EKG.

I'll be dry hopping with another 30g of Fuggles once the fermentation dies down a bit.

But essentially I used a larger amount of high Alpha Acid hops for a shorter length of time. This gives the same amount of bittering as you would expect for less hops boiled for 1 hour, but I'm hoping it'll give a smoother bittering profile. Still boiled for 1 hour since there are other things boiling does beyong isomerizing hops (such as carmelising the sugars, driving off DMS).

Here's hoping it works out well.

[Cellar_Rat]

With that amount of hops is it a hundred gallon brew you're making !!

With that comment in mind I have just bought 10 lemons and a kilo of ginger root for a 5 gallon batch of ginger beer.

Does anybody know what the cream of tartar are actually does?

[koomber]

With that amount of hops is it a hundred gallon brew you're making !!

With that comment in mind I have just bought 10 lemons and a kilo of ginger root for a 5 gallon batch of ginger beer.

Does anybody know what the cream of tartar are actually does?

What can I say? I likes me some hops It's only 140g in a 20L batch

It won't actually be that bitter because of the short boil times on the hops that are boiled, but it should have a fair bit of flavour to it. Something that'll be just perfect for the summer months.

[RTPFUN]

Ah the wine queue! Time to sort it all out. Racked degassed and added finings to two Kenridge kits two wine expert kits and a wine number two that had grape skins in. Bottled the Kenridge Californian Grand Red, put on a wine number one and a Kenridge Viognier kit and still have a Kenridge Nebbiolo to get started.

[lockwood1956]

You have been a busy bunny

[goldseal]

Still working away, and doing what I can, when I can (i.e. not much).

Need freezer space (Tesco 1l wine cartons, when frozen, make very good cool blocks for the coolbox for my upcoming Le Mans trip), so removed a few pounds of frozen grape skins from Grapefest. These were added to the concentrate from a Wilkinsons 6 bottle Cab Sav kit (obtained for £4), along with a bit of oak and half a pack of Gervin GV4 I found lying about. Highly scientific .

I have left Mrs.Goldseal to punch down the cap while I'm away at work. The intention is that this will become cooking wine rather than anything decent.

[ukric]

cooking wine? you've been reduced to making cooking wine?!? eeeek

[goldseal]

Well, I'm trying to DELIBERATELY make cooking wine, rather than ACCIDENTALLY making it .

Mrs.G does use rather a lot of wine in her cooking (or, to be more accurate, a little cooking in her wine), so it makes sense to make it. There is no way she is using any of my Grapefest creations!

[RTPFUN]

Filtered and bottled a wine number two that had grape skins from a Kenridge kit added to it. The sample was very nice this is going to be a fabulous little rose.

[RTPFUN]

Tidied up the cellar moved the ready to drink reds to the front shelves and put a nice selection on the bottom rear shelves to keep for another year. Then the bottles!!!. Tidied them all up sorted them out into groups of 30 that matched same colour same shape so they’ll look nice. I was thinking that this is very anorak but was encouraged by “her wot must be obeyed” that the wine will look better if all the bottles are the same for each brew. Obviously as you can tell from that statement we don’t drink them one at a time.

[Gaztops]

I wish I had a cellar or garage, my fermenting tubs are in the bedroom.

Gary